My inner monologue is a gorgon, and she won’t shut the fuck up. She sits outside and listens to the sirens. Echos of past, present, and future. Time isn’t linear. It is an ouroboros. 

All the men in my life are statues, and I'm too busy playing with the snakes in my heart, dye in my hair, silence on my tongue. 

My fantasy fuck is a block of marble carved perfect vision and shattered with a baseball bat, rage room style. 

My fantasy love is a ghost I can’t pin down, potential stuck between my teeth.

is love always humiliating?

I want a cigarette and a trip to Greece. I want to stand next to Medusa, fall on my knees, and beg her to tell me how she did it. How she kept going when her stare, her gaze, her witness froze every man she came across. They were rock solid, pulsating with desire, hot lava that soon freezes over with their ego’s nagging inferiority. I don’t mean to excite and then emasculate, but it’s just how it’s always gone. Men fear me. Weak men, maybe. Strong men, too, though. Like I’m the last battle they must face before deciding to become something or not. 

I am made of water. 

Water that drowns, that heals, that smooths edges. I have baptized enough glass to build a thousand churches. Knelt in countless wooden pew seats to suck on dead ends. Prayed to Mary in her cocoon and asked if the sacrifice was worth it? She said she didn’t have a choice. 

There is no dam on the underworld. I am lost in the current of ghosts. People we should have been. We want to be. Womanhood. He told me only kids see ghosts. I am a stopwatch and a crybaby.

He preaches a gospel through craters in the wall. The choir echos and my neighbor’s beckoned sirens. I beg them not to take him and yet, they do. Of course they do. I avoid her judgemental stares while my dog walks me. I’m not ready for her mirror yet. I am still taming my snakes, smoothing his edges, building more churches. 

I am liquid forced solid expected to be liquid again. I am slipping through fingers. I am slicing his. I am a mirror that he can’t help but shatter. When that happens I will hold my breath and dive to back down to the bottom of my ocean for the most carefully chosen sand. I will spread it onto a canvas. Bring it to one of my churches and burn it with my gaze until it melts to reflect how I misspoke. How my waves were too rough, my tears too cold, my current inappropriate. I will bring it back to him and prepare for a litany of hammers. I will baptize him in apologies and gently suggest he places me on a windowsill. He will stuff me in his pocket.

I am not calm and quiet holy water. I do not believe in a God or worship or prayer or cocoons. I am a gorgon. My fantasy fuck is a block of marble carved perfect vision and shattered with a baseball bat, rage room style. I want to package my pheromones like perfume and drench the alter. Pour out every bottle and drown him in a tsunami of my patience. Make him choke on nostalgia. Sit in a confessional and repent. Suffer. I am no sacrificial lamb. 

I am filled with rage and sadness and hopelessness. Maybe I’ll never be satisfied. I think I’m sick of chasing it. Sick of pretending it exists. I want to lay down at the bottom of my ocean and give up. Jump off the top of my highest steeple and scream on the way down that it’s everyone else’s fault. 

But what will that give me? They’ll just look at me, heart, lungs, and guts spilling over the sidewalk and step around. Maybe ogle my trampstamp and whisper something about the lunacy of immoral women. He will nod and say I always was the drama. The snakes in my brain will slither and hiss away, disappointed with yet another weak host. The shattered bottle in my hand will glisten in the sun and reflect back all that is wrong with the world. I hope they ash their cigarettes on me so I can smell the sweet nicotine as I float up to the sky or descend past the pavement, into the earth and ground and dirt. Maybe then I’ll feel grounded and stable. Maybe then the waves within me will stop crashing and drowning. I only wanted to make beautiful sea glass. Smooth his edges, disintegrate his stone. Instead I imploded myself.

When that happens I hope my neighbor walks by to witness and speaks to me in poetry. Not about strength or resilience or fighting back but about her own experience. I hope she holds up a mirror to mine and reflects some truth in my alleged delusions. I hope she says “I know. I see. I feel. I experience. I am with you. It is all of us.” And then I will be able to peel myself off of the pavement on my own. Heart, lungs, guts, stuffed back into my carcass. I will break off an exposed piece of my rib, spit it to a hollow straw, and suck my blood up off of salted asphalt. Watch it flow down my open throat all the way to my stomach. I will store, and digest, and expel but first I will use all of it’s nutrients, pouring it’s hot iron onto the page and back to my lover or whichever next man threatens to freeze over. 

I will let him. I will leave him at the shore no matter how shipwrecked he may be. No matter how many broken bottles he has that may make perfect stained glass windows. I will soothe the snakes in my psyche. I will remind them not to blame themselves. Eve sought knowledge. Mary had no chance. Medusa held a mirror. The sirens in the distance will never stay in the distance. And time is an ouroboros.

Fiji is a writer, feminist, and cultural critic. You can watch her s0 wet s0 dry video essays on YouTube, commentary on TikTok, or follow her on Instagram.

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